By Samantha Apanasewicz
Columnist
Hospital staff employ fear tactics upon the vulnerable in order to line their own pockets and achieve their own ends. Take it from Candance Owens, a mother of two and expecting her third.
On her platform, The Daily Wire, Owens hosts a show called A Shot in The Dark, a show meant for new parents wanting to raise their children independent of ambiguous culture norms, especially when it comes to newborn care.
In the tenth episode, Owens recalls the story of the birth of her second child. The story focuses on the couple’s time spent in the hospital, the interactions with the doctors and staff on duty, and how their hospital trip quickly turned sour.
Despite Owens’ continual insistence that she not be disturbed, hospital staff continued to plague her for the 24 hours after she gave birth when all she wanted to do was rest. After the fact, Owens explained that the constant interruptions were all instances to test the baby, running up the hospital bill each time they knocked on the door.
Annoyed and fed up with consistent interference, Owens and her husband pack up to leave the hospital when suddenly, out of nowhere, the head nurse presents a mandatory form for Owens to sign if she insists on leaving before the newborn screening blood test is performed.
To Owens’ surprise, the form outlines that refusal to give the hospital a newborn blood sample before leaving is a misdemeanor by law, thus threatening legal action against Owens and her husband if they were to leave without complying.
To emphasize, there exists a law that within 24 hours, your baby’s blood must go to the state. What happens to it? Where does it go? The logical next step is asking is the state doing something with the blood. Why would they make the punishment so severe?
The answer came to Owens a month later when she discovered the following headline from Insider: “Police used NJ baby’s mandatory blood sample to pursue a criminal case. Public defenders and a newspaper are now teaming up to sue over privacy concerns.” The inference was that police found a way to attain evidence without a warrant.
Owens is stopped again when they are told the pediatrician would like them to stay for 20 more hours, all because Owens refused to take antibiotics during birth. When the pediatrician receives pushback, she threatens Owens with the possibility of her daughter dying, all because Owens did not blindly comply with taking the hospital’s antibiotics when she felt they were unnecessary.
The doctor threatened that if they did not stay in the hospital for the full 48 hours– the maximum time limit that insurance will cover– then the child had a serious risk of death, even when Owens’ daughter was healthy. Owens saw this for what it was: a fear tactic for the hospital to reap as much money from vulnerable parents as possible. If they guarantee an addition 20 hours in hospital, that is guaranteed profit.
The pediatrician’s reason for wanting to keep the baby pivoted, then, to see if she had Strep-B, something that could have been passed on from the mother. When Owens asks for her baby to be tested for Strep-B, or GBS, directly, the doctor refuses, claiming the hospital does not perform those kinds of tests. How, then, can this behavior be classified as out of concern for the child?
Grasping at straws, the doctor even threatens to call Child Protective Services on Owens if she refuses to wait the additional 20 hours. The last straw is the threat that insurance would not cover their hospital visit if they left before the 48 hours passed. With that, Owens finally leaves the hospital, informing the staff she had more than enough to pay out of pocket if it came to that.
Now, for the aftermath. Owen’s second child is happy and healthy. Additionally, their insurance did, of course, cover their entire, yet short, hospital visit, despite the threats. And logically, this makes the most sense. Why would an insurance company refuse to pay for a shorter stay? The shorter stay is less money owed.
An article published in 2019 by the New York Post provides evidence that Owens is not alone in her experiences. The headline reads “I was bullied by hospital staff during childbirth.” The article outlines another “uneventful pregnancy” evolving into mistreatment at the hospital. According to the 2017 study cited, over 200 women felt that their birth plans and preferences were ignored by hospital staff in favor of the nurses’ wants and needs.
Using the words of Candance Owens, this provides the basis for “hospital corruption.” Hospitals prey upon new mothers who are tired and overwhelmed, using fear to coerce them in doing what’s best for the hospital, not what’s best for mother and child.